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Chapter 1 of the author's Dickens and Phiz, which Indiana University Press published in 1978. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

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Numbers in brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers.

Bibliographical information appears in the form of in-text citations, which refer to items in the bibliography at the end of each document.

April Julia Ang and Adrian Kang of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore produced the electronic text in 2000 using OmniPage Pro OCR software and created the HTML version, converting footnotes and adding links under the direction of George P. Landow. In November 2009 Landow reformatted and relinked the text.

References

Browne, Edgar. Phiz and Dickens. London: Nisbet, 1913.

Harvey, John R. Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrations. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970.

Winkles, H. and B. Architectural and Picturesque Illustrations of the Cathedral Churches of England and Wales. 3 vols. London: Effingham Wilson and Charles Tilt, 1836-42. [These were first issued in monthly parts, from 1835 onwards.]

t would be misleading to suggest that the illustrated novel dominated
Victorian fiction, since throughout the era many writers, major and minor,
published their books without pictures, and without any apparent sense that
something was lacking. The Brontës come immediately to mind among the major
Victorian novelists, and with a few exceptions both George Eliot and George
Meredith published their novels unillustrated, while Anthony Trollope's novels
contained illustrations during only a limited segment of his long career.
Nonetheless, the illustration of novels in their first appearance was
widespread; for certain authors it was a significant factor in the process of
creation and in the total form of their books. Generalizations about so large a
field are inevitably treacherous, but if we are to understand the role of
illustrations in Dickens' novels, and in particular those of is main
illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne, we must hazard some theories about the
historical, aesthetic, and interpretative implications of this mixture of
artistic media.

To account historically for the pervasiveness of illustrations in :Victorian
fiction we must look back to the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,
whose publication began in 1836. Dickens' financial success with Pickwick's mode of publication — monthly, one-shilling parts, with two full-page
illustrations in each — encouraged other authors and publishers to try something
similar. Among the many novelists operating at least sporadically in [1/2] this mode we may mention Charles Lever, W. Harrison Ainsworth, William Makepeace
Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. It can be argued that the non-intellectual,
largely middle class audiences to whom the publishers hoped to sell the novels
of Dickens, Lever, Ainsworth, Thackeray, and Trollope found the illustrations
especially attractive as a supplementary form of visualization, whereas more
intellectual novelists such as Eliot and Meredith did not require illustrations
for their particular audiences.

Even if these generalizations are valid, further distinctions must be made
among the five illustrated novelists mentioned. Lever and Ainsworth were both
something more than hacks and something less than artists. Dependent to some
degree upon their illustrators to attract sales, they made no particularly
complex or original use of illustrations. Trollope (though he was gratified to
have so famous an artist as Millais to illustrate several novels) was not very
interested in the illustrations, and the fact that he would always complete his
novel before the publication of Part 1 — in contrast to the other four novelists,
who published the installments while the novels were in progress — would tend to
diminish if not eliminate meaningful collaboration between author and
illustrator. On the other hand, even though their work in the dual medium
originated in a series of historical accidents, Thackeray and Dickens found it a
congenial mode and made it into a distinct subgenre of the novel.

Despite their very great differences as men and as novelists, Dickens and
Thackeray shared common influences, such as the emblem book and the satirical
engraving, which made available to them a range of visual and verbal techniques
including metaphor, allusion, and analogy. Thackeray, as his own illustrator,
used these techniques most frequently in the wood-engraved initial letters and
tailpieces to chapters, illustrations additional to the two etchings per monthly
part. Thus in Vanity Fair the fool in cap and bells recurs as a visual
motif, while Becky Sharp appears as a mermaid, a female Napoleon, and, in a
full-page etching, as Clytemnestra. But Vanity Fair is also conceived
verbally in similar terms from its title onward: the puppet motif is carried
through the novel, and the clock bearing the sacrifice of Iphigenia as an emblem
(which represents the sacrifice of an Osbourne daughter's fulfilment in life to
her father's [2/3] selfish needs) occurs first in the text, and only later in an
illustration. In Dickens' novels, such a detail appears in one of Browne's
illustrations (to Dombey and Son — published concurrently with Vanity
Fair).

By the time Vanity Fair began publication, Dickens and Browne had
already established their relationship in five novels, three of which were in
what became the commonest format for their collaboration: monthly parts with two
etched illustrations in each, usually a total of nineteen parts in all, the
final one of double length with four etchings. (Because of the haphazard nature
of its origins, Pickwick was a few parts longer, and A Tale of Two
Cities, the last Dickens novel to be illustrated by Browne, appeared in only
eight installments.) Dickens' comfort with the format is suggested by the fact
that be used it twice more after dropping Browne as illustrator, in Our
Mutual Friend and the unfinished Edwin Drood. From the very
beginning, as I hope to demonstrate, Browne seems to have taken it upon himself
to introduce his own emblematic details, thereby commenting upon or pointing up
some aspect of the text, and by the time of Martin Chuzzlewit, the third
collaboration with Dickens in monthly installments, a complex relationship had
developed between text and illustration.

Victorian illustrated novels, and in particular those of Dickens and
Thackeray, present certain aesthetic and interpretative problems. In many of
Thackeray's novels we have a self-illustrated writer, whose artistic intention
may be thought of as unified even though he works in two media. But with Dickens
and his illustrators we cannot, despite Dickens' practice of giving detailed
instructions, assume such a single intention. Because the illustrations include
elements which are specified by the author, but are not the author's own
creations, and further because the artist introduces details of his own, we find
that the illustrator is at once collaborator, attempting to express the author's
intention visually; interpreter, offering his own comments on the meaning of the
work; and perhaps even an artist, sometimes creating independently
valuable works of art. The paramount problem for readers of Dickens, a problem
at once both aesthetic and interpretative, is how to "read" the text and
illustrations in conjunction with one another. In the renowned etching for
Vanity Fair, in which Becky Sharp appears in both the caption and a small
[3/4] allusive detail as Clytemnestra (i.e., a murderess), Thackeray's intentions
can hardly be doubted. The critic may feel that to make Becky a murderess is
incompatible with her character as presented in the novel, but Thackeray surely
intended this illustration as a hint (rather a heavy-handed one) about something
never directly confirmed in the text.

In Browne's illustrations for Dickens we cannot always be certain of such a
unity of intention. There are many examples, indeed, of discrepancies, as when
the author — both in his text and his instructions to Browne — specifies ten young
gentlemen at Doctor Blimber's academy (Dombey and Son) and the
illustrator depicts seventeen (A list of some twenty such discrepancies has been kindly made availbale top me by Mr. Nicholas Bentley, and and as Mr. Bentley remarks, there are undoubtedly many more.). Such instances do not, however, pose the main theoretical problem. In some cases they are the result of inadequate direction from the author, in others, of the illustrator's carelessness. At any rate, such
discrepancies may be seen as artistic slips which do not affect the meaning of
the novel — although they may disrupt the full enjoyment of the reader determined
to read the work as an integration of words and pictures.

But emblematic detail, seemingly introduced by the artisit without the
author's direction or overt approval, raises more serious problems. There seems
to be no alternative but to recognize Hablot Browne as both collaborator and
interpreter; however, the problem is complicated by the fact that we often lack
adequate evidence to distinguish with certainty between Dickens' intention and
Browne's, between collaboration and interpretation. For the readers of Dicken
the problem is made less formidable, even if it is not resolved, by the
consideration that Dickens and Browne, though widely different in temperament
and talent, like Dickens and Thackeray shared certain artistic traditions.
Dickens' use of emblematic details, whereby perceptions of the sometimes
daunting and sometimes comical circumstances of human existence may be expressed
in condensed allusions — not reduced to them, but signposted, as it were, in a
form reminiscent of the poem-plus-picture of the emblem book.

The degree of insight and originality of these images varies in both author
and illustrator, and in Browne's illustrations they can at times seem almost
crude. Thus the book titles, Paradise Lost [4/5] and Tartuffe, in the illustration depicting Mr. Pecksniff's defeat in Martin Chuzzlewit, may
seem merely facile comments on the fawning hypocrite's fall from grace with the
wealthy. But upon further reflection the analog with Satan implies a much
broader significance: Blake's observation that Milton was on the devil's side
without knowing it still has force for many readers of Paradise Lost, and
equally, many readers see Mr. Pecksniff's linguistic brilliance and personal
resiliency as qualities which make him perhaps the most interesting character in
the novel (and which are not dissimilar to the author's own qualities).

Such a flight into implicit meanings raises the further question of the
extent of Browne's awareness of such complexities, and also of the Victorian
reader's ability to notice and interpret such details and integrate them into
his reading of the text. I have uncovered no evidence of how subtly contemporary
readers "read" Browne's illustrations, nor do we have access to Browne's or
Dickens' thoughts on the matter. What we do know is that Dickens was capable of
an astonishing range of insight and expression, and that Browne was a literate
man, widely read and fully conscious of his predecessors on English graphic art,
from Hogarth through John Doyle ("HB") and the Cruikshanks. Even if not a single
Victorian reader recognized the complexities of the illustrations they are
there, like the complexities of the texts; they are at once an expression of
Dickens' intentions and Browne's interpretation, at once a visual accompaniment
to the text and a commentary upon it. They were important to Dickens, and they
can be important to any reader who makes the effort to recapture a mode of
"reading" graphic art which may have already been dying out in the
mid-nineteenth century.

Hablot Knight Browne (with no circumflex over the o, a journalistic
addition unaccountably followed by some modern scholars) was born on 11 June
1815, the ninth son in a middle-class family which would ultimately number ten
sons and five daughters. His father having died in 1824, the main influence upon
the early course of Browne's life seems to have been his brother-in-law, Mr.
Elnahan Bicknell, a wealthy, self-made businessman and self-taught collector of
modern English art (Turner in particular), who was in later years a neighbour
and friend of [5/6] Ruskin. It was Bicknell who encouraged Browne's artistic talent and arranged for his apprenticeship to the prominent steel engravers, Finden's,
as a way of acquiring a trade which would provide a means of self-support for
this ninth son in a family of fifteen children (Thomson, p. 19). The biographical sources agree that Hablot was not very happy with the tedious labor of engraving, and although
he always described his profession as that of "engraver," (Browne, p. 3) not use this
technique during his long career and the few steel engravings he designed were
executed by others. He did certainly become proficient in etching, for in 1833
he was awarded a medal from the Society of Arts for "John Gilpin's Ride," a rather
crude performance which nevertheless shows considerable skill in the drawing of
horses and the use of light and shadow to indicate modeling offorms (Reproduced in E. Browne, fac. p. 4.). There are stories of Hablot's truancy (visits to the British Museum) and his penchant for fanciful drawing rather than tedious engraving. Whatever the immediate cause, his indentures were canceled in 1834, two years early by mutual consent, and he set up shop sometime during the next two years with Robert Young, a fellow apprentice at Finden's, as etcher, engraver, and illustrator (Thomson, p. 21; E. Browne, p. 5).

Finden's was engaged in the production of many of the popular engravings of
the time, including picturesque views and plates for the annuals, which were
intended largely as gift books for young ladies. The subjects of such plates
were usually portraits of titled ladies and scenes from Byron or Moore, with the
occasional comic scene thrown in. Browne must have been influenced to a degree
by his tenure at Finden's, but the only known work tying him even indirectly to
his unloved masters is Winkles's Cathedrals (1835-42), the first two volumes of which contained designs by Browne. Winkles had been an apprentice at Finden's, and a number of the line-engraved plates of English and Welsh
cathedrals are signed "HKB"; we can perhaps see Browne's characteristic touch in
the incidental figures that populate some of the views, but there is really no
hint at all of the illustrator about to emerge into public favor, briefly as
"N.E.M.O.," and then permanently as "Phiz".

The early life of Charles
Dickens, three years Browne's senior, is too familiar to recount here; but a few
points about his early [6/7] writings should be recalled. Dickens' first book-length work, Sketches by
Boz, is perhaps more dependent upon its illustrations for appeal than
anything else he subsequently wrote; in fact its illustrator, George Cruikshank,
was the famous member of the duo, the pseudonymous "Boz" a complete unknown. The
original intention of Chapman and Hall for The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club was that the author "write up to" a series of comic
illustrations on sporting subjects, after the fashion of the Combe-Rowlandson
collaboration in the Doctor Syntax books (1817-22), or the Egan-Cruiksliank
brothers' collaboration on Life in London (1821), with four etchings per
monthly part forming the basis for the text. Dickens was evidently not even the
first choice as an author, but once hired he took over the reins with great
assurance and immediately reversed the intended relationship between himself and
his artist, Robert Seymour. It is useless to conjecture whether this relegation
to secondary status somehow led to Seymour's suicide: the important point is
that Dickens, almost accidentally, as it were, created a new art form in his
simultaneous composition of the texts for the novel's parts and supervision of
its illustrators. But new as the form was, both he, and his most frequent
illustrator, Hablot Browne, drew upon a rich set of iconographical
traditions.

Iconography is a tenn used more than a bit loosely by modern literary
scholars, possibly because the word icon (understood as equivalent to
image) can when translated from the pictorial to the verbal mode
encompass such a wide range of literary elements. But however wide this range
may be, the word must refer specifically to a system or set of systems for
communicating meaning: in literature, a consistent use of elements to convey
some set of emotions or ideas. These elements (usually metaphoric or symbolic)
may be objects, characters, colors, or landscapes.

Thus, one can without difficulty speak of the iconography of the text of
Bleak House, though one may have in mind the use of the images of fog and
mud, the parallels between Chancery, Parliament, and Tom-All-Alone's, or the
structure of the plot centering on Esther Surnmerson's lost and recovered
identity. These are distinct systems of meaning in that novel, though they
overlap and intersect at various points: in the connection between Esther's
identity, the family of the Dedlocks, the place of the [7/8] Dedlocks in the social
system (including the iconographical significance of their name), and so on. The
relation among systems of iconography in Dickens can be taken as parallel to
systems of meaning in graphic art, and particularly in reference to the moral
art of William Hogarth — for as soon as one turns to a title such as Oliver
Twist; or, the parish boy's progress, the conscious connection to
Hogarth (though possibly to Bunyan as well) becomes apparent.

Indeed, each of Dickens' novels presents some kind of progress — whether
Pickwick's or Copperfield's or Pip's — and while to say this may be little more
than to say that they are each some variety of Bildungsroman, most of
them are specifically linked to Hogarth via their illustrations, which from the
beginning function in a number of ways. First, they offer fixed visual images of
the characters, something some modern readers may feel constricting to their
reading experience (Such a complaint is offered by Lauriat Lane, p. 245), but which may have served a necessary function in the
original serial versions by maintaining continuity over the many months of
publication. Further, through inscription and emblem, the illustrations
frequently emphasize moral meanings which are understated or even unstated in
the text; at times they provide crucial information absent from the text; and
finally they offer interpretations of certain aspects of the novel, revealing
implications of which the novelist himself may be fully conscious. In the latter
respect, the illustrators are Dickens' first critics.

Only Hablot Knight Browne, more familiarly known as Phiz, illustrated the
whole of more than one of Dickens' novel in its original form; thus only he can
be seen developing as an artist during Dickens' career in ways parallel to the
novelist's development. My subsequent chapters dealing with individual novels
will trace such parallels; but first three general topics require examination:
Browne's inconographical methods and their relationship to tradition; his
methods of work; and the nature of his collaboration with Dickens. Perhaps the
most controversial issue is the degree of his independence as an interpreter of
the novelist's works.

Browne's and Dickens' most obvious mutual influence is the satiric work of
William Hogarth, in particular his "progress" — [8/9] series of plates telling a story. According to Ronald Paulson visual-narrative art develops in its modes of
expression from a predominant use of "learned and popular" iconography and
of "meaning based primarily on explicit readable "structures to meaning based on
spatial and formal structures" (Emblem and Expression, p. 46). Plate I of A Harlot's Progress (1732)
reads like a printed text from left to right — the elements representing the young
girl's past (her countrified and innocent appearance in the plate's center), and
future (the bawd, and to her right the girl's first customer as a prostitute) (Paulson, Hogarth, 1: 265). It also implies to the astute "reader" a parody of the Choice of Hercules
between vice and virtue. On a less classical level, the goose in the basket
alludes to the girl as a "silly goose" (Emblem and Expression, pp. 38, 43). Typically, these early engravings are
full of such objects as clocks, suggesting the passage of time, and paintings,
such as those in A Harlot's Progress, II, which "imply the stern Old Testament
justice that Moll can expect from the Jew" ( Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 1: 145).

The later series, Industry and Idleness (1742), Paulson shows, is
virtually devoid of emblem or allusion, and seems to put forth a very simple
industry-idleness, good-evil opposition. But Hogarth now uses the more subtle
means of arranging figures and paralleling the positions of the Industrious and
Idle apprentices in the last two plates, undercutting the apparent opposition
and implying an ambiguous analogy, a moral uncertainty about the "good"
apprentice (Emblem and Expression, pp. 64ff). Without claiming that I can prove a direct influence of this development in Hogarth upon Browne, I think it is interesting that it is in some ways paralleled by Browne's career as Dickens' illustrator: having begun with an
emphasis upon emblematic details and progressing through a more ingenious and
involved use of such techniques in his middle career, Browne also developed the
technique of visual parallelism of structures and gradually reduced the use of
emblems in Dickens' later novels, finally relying upon the inventive use of
striking tonalities (through the innovative use of what was called the "dark
plate," a specially prepared etching resembling the mezzotint).

As Paulson tells us, eighteenth-century painting tended to move from an
appeal from difficultas, the pleasure of reading complex visual
structures, to a preference for claritas, "totally [9/10] and immediately
graspable impression." (Ibid., p.51.) Similarly, the development of nineteenth-century
British book illustration would move in such a direction: from complex
emblematic structures to simple pictorial design. By the 1860s Browne's art as
an illustrator would be noticeably out of step with this development.

In the early Victorian period, however, the illustrative work of Cruikshank,
Thackeray, and Browne still drew extensively on the techniques of Hogarth and
his followers in "lower" graphic art — the multitude of graphic satirists from
Gillray to Cruikshank himself the mode of the "progress" was already familiar to
early Victorian readers not only through Hogarth (whose works were frequently
reprinted, often in very portable book form, as in by the late 1840s, Trusler's
Hogarth Moralized) but also through many subsequent series of comic or
satiric aquatints and etchings, published with or without letterpress, right up
through the 1830s. (See Kunzle, for examples of sequential graphic satire.) Furthermore, the use of emblems with traditional, more or
less fixed meanings would be familiar from numerous sources in addition to that
mass of comic graphic art: from reprinted and original emblem poetry such as
that of Quarles; translated versions of such continental emblematists as Alciati
and Ripa; and perhaps most widely, moral and instructive emblem books for
children, of which Bunyan's Divine Emblems (1686 — first printed with
illustrations in 1724 and frequently reprinted), Wynne's Choice Emblems,
Natural, Historical, Fabulous, Moral and Divine; For the Improvement and Pastime
of Youth (1772), and W. Pinnock's Iconology: Or Emblematic Figures
Explained (1830) may serve as representative titles.

But by the early 1840s the coming change in illustration was already heralded
by the work of at least one popular illustrator, John Leech, whose work
superficially resembles Browne's and Cruikshank's but who abandoned the old
emblematic modes for a simpler and clearer style. (Citations in the form "Illus. I" refer to illustrations following Chapter Six of this volume.). Leech was never
really comfortable in Browne's and Cruikshank's favorite technique, etching. He
became known primarily as the designer of straightforward, humorous,
wood-engraved cartoons—in our modern sense — for Punch. In turn, Leech's art
influenced Punch artists and illustrators including Tenniel, Du Maurier, and
[10/11] Keene, while simultaneously the dominant mode of book
illustration by these artists and such others as Marcus Stone, Fred Walker, and
John Everett Millais became by the 1860s almost totally divorced from Browne's
mode. Thus, wood engraving replaced etching, a quasi-caricatural way of drawing
characters be came a blander, rather idealized style, and emblem and allusion
disappeared almost totally. It is not insignificant that some of these younger
artists had pretensions to high art, nor that Millais in particular may have
been slumming (though for very good pay) when he did illustrations for Trollope
and others.

Cruikshank was already having difficulty finding employment by the late
1840s, but Browne worked steadily into the 1850s, to some extent varying his
style (as distinct from his iconographic techniques) to suit the new tastes. It
is important to stress here that serious interest in Browne s emblematic and
somewhat caricatural art has been revived only in the 1960s, and that for many
decades it was fashionable to champion the more austere "Sixties" illustration
as the great maturation of the English illustrated book — Cruikshank and Browne
being seen as rather vulgar, inartistic craftsmen.

Illustration for Can You Forgive Her by E. Taylor [Illustration 2].

Illustration for Can You Forgive Her by E. Taylor [Illustration 3].

Browne's failure to make the
transition to the new kind of illustration is epitomized in his etchings for the
first ten parts of Trollope's Can You Forgive Her ? in 1864. These wholly nonemblematic depictions of Trollope's rather mundane characters
simply lack the life of Browne's best work; and although they displeased
Trollope because of their inaccuracy, one may speculate that in addition they
still looked too much like the famous illustrations for Dickens. That the second
half of the novel was given instead to a woman who drew for the woodblock
(Illus. 3) was a real slap in the face to Browne, and when Dickens (who had not
employed Browne since 1859) hired Marcus Stone to illustrate Our Mutual
Friend with wood engravings at around the same time, the rejection was
complete. (The circumstances have been most fully outlined by John R. Harvey, p. 164.) although we may feel that Browne at his best would have been a more
suitable illustrator than Stone for Dickens' last completed novel, it is clear
that Browne, like Uncle Sol Gills, was behind the times. Yet the inference one
draws from such critics as Gleeson White and Forrest Reid that Victorian
popular book illustration can be taken seriously only from the 1860s onwards,
must be thoroughly resisted — unless, that is, one is [11/12] willing to reject
Thackeray's writing along with his illustration and Dickens along with Browne.
For a nonallusive, nonsymbolic writer like Trollope the rather static, totally
nonemblematic, and ostensibly realistic art of a Millais may be fully adequate,
though it is hardly essential. But Dickens' literary art is of a different kind.
Allusive, symbolic, and yet in some ways more overtly didactic than the work of
Trollope, Dickens' novels are also strongly visual, and his influences are as
much those of the graphic as of the verbal artist. In fact, in many ways it can
be argued that Dickens inherited Hogarth's mantle as the great English comic and
satiric artist, developing his own artistic vision of the realities of his
society without becoming a simple portrayer of "hard times," and penetrating
below the human surfaces without adopting psychological realism as his primary
method. And it is Dickens who, after being thrown into authorship of an
illustrated novel in monthly parts by Chapman and Hall's failure to obtain
William Clarke, author of the 1830 work, Three Courses and a Dessert, illustrated by George Cruikshank (see Johnson, I, 115-16), developed his own kind of novel, the illustrations to which were to be his continuing concern over a period of twenty-three years.

Sunday under Three Heads
[Illustration 4].

The first collaboration between Dickens and Browne was on something
considerably less than a novel, but it clearly shows their joint debt to the
Hogarthian tradition (Since both Sunday Under Three Heads and the fourth part of Pickwick, for which Browne was engaged, were published in June 1836, the order of events is not certain.). The first two of the three small wood engravings for the anti-Sabbatarian pamphlet Sunday Under Three Heads demonstrate the complementary nature of Browne's and Dickens' art, for they make explicit a quality which is only latent in the text. Dickens conceived his tendentious
pamphlet in the mode of Hogarth's Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751),
posing alternative consequences which will result from two opposed ways of
ordering British society. The immediate occasion of Hogarth's pair of engravings
was a measure to limit the sale of gin (Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 1, p. 207.), while Dickens was concerned with the
repressive Sabbath Bills, but both men present contrasts of healthy and depraved
London life. Dickens mentions beer often enough in the first essay to make
reasonable the connection with Hogarth's plates; for the drinking of beer "in
content and comfort" is clearly contrasted with "outward signs of profligacy or
debauchery." (Sunday Under Three Heads, in The Nonesuch Dickens, 23 vols. (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), 22: 507.) although the second essay does not mention the beer which is
earlier associated with innocent recreation, it predicts that the restrictive
Sabbath laws will produce much more profligacy, idleness, drunkenness, and vice." (Ibid., p. 516.)
[12/13]

Despite their technical weakness, the two cuts illustrating these two essays
make evident the twenty-one year old Browne's maturity as an interpreter of the
moral significance of his author's text. In particular they make use of
iconographic techniques developed by Hogarth and his followers, especially
emblematic detail — the church, the clock, and the inscription ("Bread Street") — to
underline certain implications of the text. These sorts of devices
are employed by Browne in every Dickens novel he illustrated through Little
Dorrit (as well as in many by other authors), and they increase in frequency
from Pickwick on, reching a high point in Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and
Son, and David Copperfield, then diminishing in Bleak House
and Little Dorrit, and disappearing entirely from the sixteen
illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities. The particular categories of
emblematic detail are various, from biblical allusions to titles of plays,
sculptures or pictures representing classical mythology, references to Hogarth
and Aesop, book titles of various kinds, and fairly standard emblematic objects
such as clocks, cobwebs (usually indicating that the hero is somehow trapped,
like a fly), maps, pictures of ships sailing smoothly or sinking — the list is
almost endless.

Traddles and I,
conference with the Misses Spenlow [Illustration 5].

At times the use of such details may seem crude and obvious, as
when David Copperfield's suit to Dora via her aunts in "Traddles and I,
conference with the Misses Spenlow," is commented on by a trio of pictures captioned "The Momentous Question," "The Last Appeal," and "Arcadia," as well as the books Paradise Regained and The Loves of Angels,
and the figurine of a girl picking the petals off a flower. It could be argued,
I suppose, that the very obviousness of these details has a comic effect
appropriate to David's passion for silly little Dora; but the same illustration
contains two more details of greater significance: in a cage, two lovebirds sit
apart while in small bowl one goldfish seems to pursue the other. If these pairs
of creatures represent David and Dora, the fact that they are fulfilling their
loves in small, enclosed containers from which there is no escape is a subtle
and easily overlooked comment on the realities of the new status in life to
which David so enthusiastically aspires.

The Discovery of Jingle in the Fleet [Illustration 22].

Examples of both seemingly simple as well as subtle emblematic details are
numerous, but I shall offer only one more at present. In Pickwick Papers,
"The Discovery of Jingle in the [13/14] Fleet" is especially interesting
because it includes an emblematic detail that seems to have its origin in
Dickens' text: the prisoner's wife

who was watering, with great solicitude, the
wretched stump of a dried-up, withered plant, which, it was plain to see, could
never send forth a green leaf again; — too true an emblem, perhaps, of the office
she had come there to discharge.

[The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (London: Chapman and Hall, 1837), p. 453. All subsequent references to passages from Dickens' novels will be to the first published editions and will be given in the text.]

Not mentioned in the text but present in the
illustration, however, is a poster on the wall, apparently the famous
antislavery poster, "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" The reference is surely to
the appearance of the haggard jingle and Trotter, two rogues whose imprisonment
Pickwick was eager to effect early in the novel, but whose suffering has made
the imprisoned hero suddenly conscious of his common humanity with them. Whether
Dickens or Browne is responsible for such nontextual details is a question I
shall take up presently.

The use of emblematic details is perhaps most complex in a number of the
covers Browne designed for the monthly parts and in a few of the frontispieces.
These designs employ allegorical structures which comment upon the novel as a
whole, although their sources are comparable to those from which the emblematic
details in the regular illustrations derive. A less common kind of iconography
is allusion via the partial or entire structure of an illustration, perhaps most
notably achieved in the title page to Martin Chuzzlewit ,
which (as I shall demonstrate in the chapter on that novel) refers directly to
Plate I of A Harlot's Progress(Illus. 58), and by so doing makes an
important comment upon both the novel's hero and its comic-grotesque villain,
Pecksniff. This etching is but one of many executed by Browne for Dickens that
are "readable" in the Hogarthian sense.

The disposition of shapes and figures in an illustration can be as
iconographically simple a matter as the placement of Dombey in the center of the
picture, while his neglected and scorned daughter Florence is relegated to a
space outside the doorframe (in "The Dombey Family"); or as subtle as the
position of the horizontal building support at the top of the picture in "Tom
all alone's" (Illus. 98), as though it were supporting not merely the buildings but the sky, implying an imminent collapse of society [14/15] as a whole. But the disposition of figures becomes a more immediately understandable device for
expressing meaning when it is used as a way of drawing parallels between two
illustrations — usually, though not always, a pair in a single monthly part. Thus,
the raised right hand of Mr. Turveydrop and that of Mr. Chadband in,
respectively, "A model of parental deportment" and "Mr. Chadband
'improving' a tough subject" suggest a parallel between these two
charlatans, which, though implied in the text, is never stated therein. This use
of various sorts of parallels among illustrations becomes one of Browne's most
effective ways of implying meanings, of interpreting the text.

In the last two of Dickens' novels in which Phiz's illustrations play an
important part Bleak House and Little Dorrit, yet another
iconographic mode — at times in combination with the earlier ones — represents what
may be the peak of Browne's accomplishment. In these two novels Browne makes
heavy use of a technique commonly called the "dark plate" (though that term is
misleading since certain plates are anything but dark), which allows for much
more subtle uses of light and shades of dark, rather like the technique of
mezzotint. It contributes greatly to the dark and pessimistic atmosphere of the
text, and among other things enables Browne to suggest the insignificance and
helplessness of individuals in an institutional world, with an effectiveness
scarcely possible by any other method.

Browne's early development of the dark plate technique seems to have taken
place outside of his collaboration with Dickens, particularly in his work for
Charles Lever, and the really heavy use of emblematic detail first occurs not in
Martin Chuzzlewit but a year or two earlier, in Thomas Miller's
Godfrey Malvern.

And this brings us to the difficult question of the respective roles of
Dickens and Browne in the invention and execution of the illustrations. For
years it has been standard to assume in discussions of Dickens' illustrations
that because the novelist gave his illustrators detailed instructions regarding
each plate, we may consider the author to be "throned in the chair of authority,
with his hand guiding the pencil of the artist at his own free will" (Arthur Waugh, pp. 33-34). This
assumption has at times been questioned, most notably in the articles of Robert
L. Patten and to some extent in [15/16] John Harvey's Victorian Novelists and
Their Illustrators (although as we shall see, Harvey is at times a champion
of authorial control), but the subject has never been thoroughly aired. In order
to provide such an airing, I must turn first to some rather technical matters,
the question of how Browne's plates were produced; then to what I consider the
very strong evidence of a high degree of independence on the part of Phiz, and
finally to the typical pattern of collaboration.

The two main modes of graphic reproduction for which Hablot K. Browne made
designs throughout his career are the wood engraving and the etching. Wood
engraving is a relief method; that is, it involves cutting away the wood
from around the lines intended to print black, leaving them standing in ridges;
it differs from woodcutting, strictly defined, in that the latter entails
cutting upon the plank grain of the wood with a knife, while the wood engraver
works on the end grain of the wood with engraver's tools. Both differ
fundamentally from line or steel engraving and etching, where the lines that
print black are cut into the metal (intaglio). Whereas steel engraving is
done by hand, with a burin, in an etching the lines are "bitten" into the copper
or steel with acid.

Since wood engravings, like type, are in relief they can be printed along
with a text, while steel engravings and etchings must be printed separately,
with the moistened paper pressed into the inked grooves of the metal. There are
many ways in which a design may be transferred to the woodblock or the steel
(including direct drawing or etching, without any transfer), but I shall
describe only those methods which Browne typically used. A different method of transfer for etchings is described by Harvey, p. 183, which may be correct for George Cruikshank but is demonstrably not the method Browne used. Normally, he made
use of a thin paper covered on one side with red chalk (sanguine) and placed it,
chalk side down, on the woodblock, which was already covered with Chinese white;
the drawing was then placed on this, face up, and the main outlines were traced
over with a blunt point. The red outlines on the white surface were then used as
the basis for drawing directly on the block in black pencil (E. Browne, p. 164.). In this form it
would go to the wood engraver, upon whose skill a great deal would ultimately
depend, as can be seen readily by a comparison of the various engravers employed
for the cuts (a term I shall use throughout [16/17] when speaking of wood engravings) in Master Humphrey's Clock.

The production of an etching was more complicated, and the whole process
remained in the hands of Browne and his associate, Robert Young. (My account of the method of transfer is derived from E. Browne, pp. 160-62.) First, a polished steel plate was prepared by applying a specially composed wax to its surface; this "ground" would then be coated with lampblack. The drawing, in more or less detail, would be transferred via sanguine paper to the etching ground in
much the same way as described above for wood engravings. It is possible that at
this point Browne also may have drawn directly on the ground, adding details
which could not easily be traced. Once the transfer was complete the job of
etching commenced with a special needle the artist cut through the ground
exposing the steel below, wherever lines were to appear in the final print. Then
followed the biting-in, a process of successive baths whereby the exposed
portions of the steel were cut into acid. Varying degrees of tone were achieved
by stopping-out some areas, after early acid baths, with varnish. The process
could be more complicated than this, for the etcher might first bite only the
main lines, then remove the ground and "pull" a proof to check the progress of
his work, then apply a new ground (which, without the added lampblack, would be
transparent) and add with his needle certain shadings and other fine details.
The number of acid baths might be considerable, though each bath might last only
a few seconds; and Browne (or Young) sometimes pulled proofs at three or more
stages of the biting.

This last point is confirmed by some of the proofs in the Dexter Collecttion
at the British Library, which show several stages of biting. The method of
transfer described by Edgar Browne may be corroborated in two ways. First, the
vast majority of Browne's surviving drawings for his etchings are reversed from
left to right indicating that some such method of transfer with the drawing face
up must have been used. Second (as no one has previously noted), in most of such
reversed drawings blind indentations are visible on the recto side, sometimes
closely following the drawn lines, sometimes diverging from them, and sometimes
adding details to the etching which are present on the drawing only in
this blind form. Stich indentations are clearly visible as early as the drawings
for the seventh part of PickwickPapers; [17/18] earlier drawings, and
some of the later ones for that novel (also reversed), seem to contain graphite
lines pressed in heavily over the original ink lines. These pencil lines may
have fulfilled the same function as the blind indentations, which became almost
universal in the drawings for the later novels.

A few of the extant drawings are not the reverse of the final etching, and
for this there are at least two possible explanations. Certain drawings are
preliminary sketches not used in the transfer, and these
are — surprisingly — sometimes drawn in the reverse of those used for transfer
(which I shall throughout call the working drawings). Second, it is possible
that Browne occasionally used another method of transfer, perhaps tracing the
drawing and then using this tracing, face down, on the sanguine paper; a number
of tracings on transparent paper for the Master Humphrey's Clock cuts
(Gimbel Collection) indicate that he did use this method for wood engravings at
times.

Understanding Browne's method of transfer enables us to distinguish between
the final, working designs (since the latter will usually be reversed and
exhibit the blind indentations I have described) and those which are
preliminary. Thus the left-right orientation of certain Dickens
illustrations — such as "Paul and Mrs. Pipchin" and the title page for Martin
Chuzzlewit — can be seen as calculated and not the result of chance, since
for these plates both unreversed preliminary and reversed working drawings
exist. (The importance of this left-right positioning will be discussed in the
relevant chapters.) In addition, it is possible to see that in some cases Browne
seems to have added details at the last moment, for although not visible in ink
or pencil, they are nonetheless present in blind indentations. Thus the "ROMA"
of the map in "Paul goes home for the holidays" is present only in this form,
suggesting a last-minute addition of a small yet significant detail — since study
of Latin is an important stultifying force in Blimber's system of education.

I make the acquaintance of Miss
Mowcher [Illustration 61].

Still other details present in the etchings are sometimes missing in the
working drawings, and this fact brings us to the question of artistic
responsibility. Some critics have offered "proof" that Dickens at least
occasionally instructed Browne in the inclusion of emblematic details in
addition to giving him the topic and caption of each plate (Anthony Burton, in his review of Harvey's book, calls it a proof" — see Dickensian 67 (1971): 109). In question is the
illustration from David Copperfield, "I make the acquaintance of Miss
Mowcher" [18/19], in which the dwarf is grooming Steerforth's hair and (in
the text) making sly remarks to the ingenuous and uncomprehending David. The
plate has three emblematic details: a ship in a storm (probably representing
Emily's impending fall but also conceivably foreshadowing Steerforth's death in
a shipwreck), a comic reference to Miss Mowcher's size and performance in a
print showing Gulliver performing for the Brobdigagians, and a scene from
Faust.

John Harvey has shown that this last detail, containing Faust, Margaret, and
Mephistopheles, clinches the text's hint of Miss Mowcher as an intermediary in
Steerforth's seduction of Emily because Mephistopbeles is standing behind Faust
as she is standing behind Steerforth, while the feather in her bonnet resembles
that in Mephistopheles' cap. Harvey traces the source of this detail to Moritz
Retzsch', but his most important discovery would seem to be that the detail was
a "late addition to the plate," because "unlike the biblical scenes in 'Martha'
[the companion illustration], it is absent from Browne's sketch." "Presumably,"
Harvey continues, "on inspecting the sketch, Dickens saw his opportunity to make
clearer a suggestion that was fogged in the text, and he dictated the necessary
amendment" (Harvey, p. 150). It may well be that Dickens specified to Browne that Miss Mowcher
was to be a panderess, but otherwise Harvey seems to fall afoul of the evidence.

First of all, as Harvey himself mentions, a detail much like the one in this
plate appears in an etching Browne did a few months before for Lever's Roland
Cashel, where it apparently derives from the text, which in turn
makes it clear that the original is Retzsch's engraving, "The Decision of the
Flower" (Retsch's Series of Twenty-six Outlines Illustrative of Goethe's Tragedy of Faust (London: Boosey and Sons, 1820), fac. p. 39 (British publisher anglicized spelling of Retzsch's name). It is also worth noting that Mcphistopheles is present in this engraving though not standing next to Faust, and that the similarity of feathers is also to be seen here.) (Illus. 9). There is even an insignificant visual parallel between the
feather in Faust's cap and Kennyfeck's bonnet in the Lever etching, and a
significant one between Roland's stance and Faust's. This earlier illustration
would seem to indicate that the scene from Faust was in Browne's mind around the
time he was working on David Copperfield.

But in addition, Harvey is wrong about the drawing for Copperfield: it does contain the Faust detail. As is often the case it is very rough, but it is clear that two figures, in approximately the
positions of Faust and Margaret (reversed, as is the entire drawing), are
intended. What the etching adds, aside from [19/20] finish, is the figure of
Mephistopheles, present in the Retzsch original though in a different position,
distant from Faust, and absent in Phiz's illustration for Lever. We have no way
of knowing for certain whether Dickens suggested the addition of Mephistopheles
or Browne invented it on his own. But the former possibility seems less likely
for the simple reason that the Faust detail in the drawing would probably
be unintelligible to Dickens when first submitted to him for approval. Given the
fact that Phiz bad already made use of the Faust motif for Lever, and
that the intention to use it in the Mowcher plate is apparent in the drawing,
the most plausible conjecture is that Browne carried through the whole thing
himself on the basis of Dickens' general instructions about the meaning of the
subject in relation to later developments in the text.

It may seem excessive to argue over such a small detail at such length, but
it must be emphasized that even if it were correct, Harvey's partly faulty
evidence would be inconclusive. Yet it is the only evidence ever offered that
Dickens instructed Browne in details down to this level of specificity. All
other surviving evidence seems to point the other way: among those extant sets
of directions to Phiz (and unfortunately Phiz burned most of his correspondence
in 1859 (E. Browne, p. 53.)), not one contains such specific details. Most telling are those
instances in which Dickens offers extremely lengthy instructions for drawings
which contain numerous such details. For the etching "Major Bagstock is
delighted to have that opportunity" in Dombey and Son, two sets of
directions survive, the second set a request to Browne for improvement on his
initial drawing, but none of the emblematic details are mentioned in either set.
Similarly, the instructions for the last four illustrations to Martin
Chuzzlewit are again lengthy and specific, but with no mention of a single
emblematic detail.

I find it difficult to imagine that if Dickens did not specify iconographic
devices in these five cases (and there are other, less dramatic instances) where
emblematic detail is so profuse, he would have done so elsewbere (Two extant letters contain such details: one is to Maclise, regarding that artist's single design for The Old Curiosity Shop; the other is to Cattermole, about the cut for the death of Nell and the one following. In the first case, Dickens specified "an old broken hour glass," which Maelise ignored; in the second case, he asked Cattermole for holly and ivy around Nell's bed, with which the artist complied, and another hour glass in the church where her grandfather is mourning, which Cattermole put instead in the death-bed scene. See letter to Daniel Maclise of? 6 November 1840, P, II, p. 146; and letter to George Cattermole of? 22 December 1840, P, II, p. 172.). Not only are
the devices similar to those used throughout the novels, but they are similar to
those Browne used in his work for other authors, especially Charles Lever, who
seems to have given Browne much less instruction than did Dickens. Thus we find
Lever writing to his [20/21] Dublin publisher from Brussels during the publication in monthly parts of Harry Lorrequer (1838-39),

H. K. Brown [sic] has not yet
written to me, and I regret it the more because if I knew the scenes he
selected, I might have benefited by his ideas and rendered them more graphic, as
an author corrects his play by seeing a dress rehearsal (Letter to James M I Glashan, 11 January 1839, in Edmund Downey, Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1906), 1: 109-11]

The mention of Phiz
selecting the subjects himself and the author altering his text to fit recalls
what John Harvey has shown about Cruikshank's relationship to Harrison Ainsworth (Harvey, pp. 38-42.). Edgar Browne's summary of his father's professional relationship to Lever
seems plausible: "From the beginning he [Lever] leant upon Phiz; he was very
easily satisfied with his illustrations, so long as they agreed with the general
drift of the text, he was not solicitous about details." (E. Browne, p. 171.) If Browne could
supply emblematic details drawn from the traditional stock for Lever, why must
we must assume that he was unable to do so for Dickens? Perhaps the question can
never be settled, but on the basis of the evidence it seems to me harder to
present a convincing argument for Dickens, complete dominance over his artist
than for Browne's independence in matters of iconography.

Typical conditions under which Browne worked would make frequent last-minute
additions under Dickens' instructions unlikely. From the early years of their
association the novelist and illustrator followed a standard pattern of
collaboration: for each forthcoming monthly number Dickens would give the
subjects of the two illustrations (or four, for the final, double numbers) and
include proof copy or a bit of manuscript whenever possible. Browne would
execute these as drawings and submit them, time and distance allowing, to
Dickens, who would either approve them or suggest alterations. If approved, the
design would be etched by Browne on a steel previously prepared by Robert Young
and then sent along to Young with the drawing and perhaps some further
instructions regarding the biting-in; according to Browne's son, Young also
"came down to Croydon nearly every Sunday, and sometimes during the week," for
consultation (Ibid., p. 167.). Here is a "diary" (evidently intended for a publisher's
guidance) of Browne's typical procedures: [21/22]

— Supposing that I had nothing else to do, you may see by the foregoing that I could not well commence etching operations until Wednesday, the
16th.

"I make ten days to etch and finish four etchings. What do you make of
it?" Browne comments at the bottom of this "diary." (Thomson, p. 234. (Four etchings means two in duplicate.)

We may take this to be a description of the normal process based on Browne's
work for a novel later than Pickwick Papers (in the Preface to which
Dickens states that "the interval has been so short between the production of
each number in manuscript and its appearance in print, that the greater portion
of the Illustrations have been executed by the artist from the author's mere
verbal description of what he intended to write").

Three Studies for The Goblin and the Sexton [Illustrations 10-12].

Throughout their
collaboration the availability of copy would depend upon how far ahead Dickens
was with his writing. It seems evident that at times Browne received only a
generalized instruction, the initial execution of which failed to jibe in some
respect with the final text. For example, "The Goblin and the Sexton," second of
a pair of Christmas plates for the tenth monthly part of Pickwick, was
done in three distinct versions. In the first (Illus. 10), two pencil sketched
figures sit together on a flat tombstone before a church porch; the second
(Illus. 11) reverses the scene and is executed in enough detail so that it could
Dickens did easily have seen the final drawing. But it turns out that the text
describes the goblin as seated on an "upright tombstone." Presumably Dickens
directed Browne to bring his illustration in line with the writing, and a
drawing of the final version, in which one can see clearly the indented transfer
lines, was produced [22/23](Illus. 12). The church porch has been changed to a
church or abbey building, but the memento mori inscription and skull of the
second drawing are repeated here.

For the most part, however, one would expect that such multiple versions
(and, presumably, instructions) were unusual, given the time pressures under
which author and illustrator operated. It is also noteworthy that Browne
remarks, "Supposing that I had nothing else to do," surely implying that he
usually did have other work. And well he might, considering what he was paid for
the Dickens illustrations. John Harvey has shown that Browne's fee from Dickens'
publishers rose from approximately £4 per etching for Pickwick to seven
guineas for David Copperfield, fourteen years later, and that although
the pay per etching for Bleak House and Little Dorrit was higher
still (£11. 8s. 6d.), his actual pay per monthly number was less because most
of the plates were no longer etched in duplicate (Harvey, pp. 187-88.). Thus, we may calculate
roughly that at his peak Browne was earning £30 per month from Dickens (from
which he had to pay Young, his "biter") hardly a huge sum for an illustrator
with fifteen years' experience and a large family to support. Moreover, such
income could be counted on for intermittent periods only: calculation reveals
that during the twenty-four years from 1836 through 1859 Browne had thirteen
years of employment on Dickens' novels. Thus it would be essential to have
several jobs in progress at once (see the Appendix for a year-by-year list of
Browne's work during his career as Dickens' illustrator); and thus the most
amazing thing about Browne is that his illustrations-especially for Dickens, but
often for other writers as well-are as technically finished and iconographically
complex as they are. Considering the differences between an independent master
engraver such as Hogarth and an etcher using his imagination on the creations of
others, Browne is to say the least a phenomenon; for he was Dickens'
collaborator and interpreter, and developed artistically as Dickens
did.